About the Department of Anthropology

From the Field

Caela O’Connell, Assistant Professor

This summer, Professor O’Connell started pilot research on her project in Northern Rwanda in partnership with UT Institute of Agriculture faculty. The project aims to increase food security and household economic sustainability for women and children through poultry farming.

As co-director of the Cultural and Disaster Action Network (CADAN), Caela gave an interactive workshop “Who Lives Here?” at the Natural Hazards Workshop in July to local, national, and international government and disaster response organizations members such as FEMA and the Sustainable Heritage Network.

The Culture and Disaster Action Network team led an interactive workshop on culture centered disaster recovery in Broomfield, Colorado

Mac Archer, DDHR graduate student

Archer studies how the Haiti earthquake of 2010 and the hurricane of 2017 have affected humanitarian aid within Haitian orphanages and children’s centers. She works at a malnutrition center conducting interviews with the local staff and founders in order to help reorganize the humanitarian aid response to countries like Haiti. Archer’s goal is to construct a more culturally relative response to the influx of orphanages being built in hopes to diminish the western ideology that Haiti needs more orphanages. The center where Archer is based, Espwa, works directly with the local population to help combat the true problems, like economic instability, that humanitarian aid is not addressing at this moment.